She almost made it.
Her fingers skimmed the metal before Alice caught her leg, nails sinking deep into her calf. Kate gasped in pain, an animal sound that seemed to stoke the Malchai’s bloodlust as she dragged her down to the floor. Kate twisted, rolling onto her back and swinging her boot across Alice’s face. The Malchai recoiled, and Kate scrambled up. She tried to ignore the blood running into her eyes, tried to ignore the mounting pain, tried to ignore everything but Alice’s red eyes glowing in the low light.
She flexed her fingers, too aware that her hands were empty. Halfway between them, an iron spike glinted on the floor, and Alice grinned, daring her to try to get there first.
Kate knew she wouldn’t—she was too slow without the monster in her head, and she was losing blood, losing strength, losing.
“I give up,” she said. “You win.”
The words caught Alice by surprise, which was exactly what Kate needed. She dove for the weapon. Alice moved a second later, but Kate’s hand had already closed around the spike and she turned, meeting the monster as the monster met her.
Kate drove the spike up into the Alice’s heart.
And Alice drove her hand into Kate’s chest.
August sank to his knees on the lobby floor.
There was nothing left of Ilsa, nothing but a small white pile of dust in a world of red, and he heard himself say her name over and over until the word lost meaning, until his voice faltered and broke. He reached out and drew his fingers through the ash.
Then he forced his hand to his comm, forced the words from his throat, forced his body to its feet as the music stopped playing and Soro reappeared, dark eyes going wide at the sight of so many stained souls. And moments later, the Night Squads poured in, and the living returned to themselves, and the Compound plunged into shock, and sorrow, and noise.
August started to retreat, and felt something crack beneath his heel. An abandoned tablet. He knelt to retrieve it, and saw it was still transmitting from the penthouse. The screen was dark, and the shot was empty. There was no sign of Alice. No sign of Kate.
No sign of life at all.
The tablet fell from his fingers.
He ran.
The elevator doors opened and August sprinted into the Harker penthouse.
It was a mess of toppled furniture and broken glass, weapons glinting and one window a violent spiderweb of cracks. Blood slicked almost every surface, some of it red and some of it black, and a mound of ash and gore was heaped on the floor, and he barely noticed any of it, because all he saw was Kate.
Kate, sitting in darkness at the kitchen counter, one arm in her lap and the other resting on the countertop, fingers wrapped around her iron spike.
She looked up when August came in. The silver was gone from her eyes, replaced by that steady blue, made bluer by the blood on her face.
“Did we win?” she asked.
A sound escaped his throat, half laugh, half sob, because he didn’t know how to answer. It seemed so wrong to call it winning when so many were dead, when Ilsa was ash, and Henry was dying, and the Compound was awash in red. But the Chaos Eater was gone, and Sloan was dead, and so he said, “Yes.”
Kate let out a trembling breath and closed her eyes. “Good.”
She let the spike roll from her fingers, and he frowned at the sight of her palm, coated with blood. It dripped to the floor beneath her stool.
“You need a medic.”
But Kate only shot him a tired smile. “I’m tougher than I look,” she said. “I just want to go . . .” She pushed herself upright, the shadow of pain crossing her face as she started toward him.
She never made it.
August was already there when her legs gave way, and he caught her, sinking with her to the floor, and even in the low light, he could see the blood staining the front of her shirt, the way it had when they’d been trapped in the subway car, when the lights had come on and the world had gone from black and white to vicious red.
“Stay with me,” he said.
They were her words once—said when he was sick, when he was on fire, when she took his burning hand and dragged him to his feet, and he got up, and he held on—and so she had to now. “Stay with me, Kate.”
“Do they stay with you?” she murmured, and August didn’t know what she meant because all he could see, all he could think of, was the blood.
There was so much of it.
It soaked through her clothes from a jagged, too-dark tear in her shirt, but when August pressed his hands to the wound, Kate shuddered, red light rising on her skin.
“No.” He tried to pull away, but Kate caught his hand, holding it in place. “Kate, please, let me—”
“The souls you take—” Her fingers tightened on his. “Do they—stay?”
And he knew what she asking, and he knew why, but he didn’t know how to answer. He thought of Leo, his brother’s voice in his head, thought of all the other voices he never heard. “I don’t know, Kate.” His voice trembled. “I don’t know.”
“Sometimes—” she said through gritted teeth, “I wish you could lie.”
“I’m sorry.” Tears were running down his face.
“I’m not.” Kate pressed her hand down over his, and he bowed his head, trying to put pressure on the wound even as the red light grew brighter and began to pour through his skin.
He didn’t want it—didn’t want anything except to give it back, to hold her together the way she’d held him. But he couldn’t. He didn’t know how. He closed his eyes as the light of Kate’s soul flowed through him, strong and bright.
“I don’t know,” he whispered. “I don’t know if the souls stay with me. But I hope they do.”
There was no answer.
August opened his eyes. “Kate?”
But the room was dark and quiet, and she was gone.
ELEGY
He found Allegro pawing at Ilsa’s door.
It had been three days, and the cat still didn’t seem to realize his sister was gone.
August knelt down. “I know.” He reached out gingerly to pet the cat. “I miss her, too.”
Allegro looked at him with sad green eyes, before climbing into his arms and nuzzling beneath his chin. August had clearly been forgiven.
He carried the cat into his own room, and set him on the bed beside Kate’s tablet. The rest of her things—the iron spikes, the silver lighter—lay in a bag beneath the bed, but it was the tablet he kept returning to.
It wasn’t locked, and when he first booted the screen, he’d found an inbox filled with unsent messages. Half-formed notes to people August had never met, people Kate would never see again.
Kate—the name echoed through him like a single, plucked string. There was no voice in his head, no way to know if she was with him. No way to know, but he could hope.
August sank onto the edge of the bed, the tablet in his hands, scrolling through the messages until he found the one from Ilsa, the one that read only AUGUST.
His chest ached.